KARL ROVE WORKS THE GOP VINEYARD

"Whither . . . ?"

The scramble is on. Without knowing how the elections will turn out, a very visible part of the Republican party is out to assert or reassert its control over the so-called party establishment. The lead actor, at least a highly visible one, is Karl Rove who is building up the financial resources for this effort by reaching into the pockets of well-heeled patrons who have backed the GOP in the past. The goal: to reassert the customary control of the party establishment by business and other private interests, while seeking to head off insurgent groups like the Tea Party (TP) movement which, along with Sarah Palin, have come to be perceived by many as the overlapping voices of the so-called disgruntled voters seeking change.

For Rove personally, his self-created visibility has also led to some embarrassment. He initially supported the efforts of the Delaware Republican party establishment which backed Congressman Mike Castle in his primary race for Joe Biden's old seat in the Senate. In supporting Castle, Rove put down the character and political viability of Christine O'Donnell who was backed by the Tea Party. After O'Donnell's surprise victory over Castle, Rove and others had to quickly backtrack and embrace her for the November 2 elections.

The Delaware primary showed the concern that establishment Republicans have about being outflanked by the far right TP and Palin not only as competitors in electing candidates, but also in ideologically defining the Republican party. Historically, the establishment party has been conservative and any tensions within the party have generally been between right-of-center moderates and the more conservative, dominant wing of the party. Now the TP has shifted the ideological tension farther to the right with the TP taking more extreme and very vocal positions, however fuzzy on specifics, on a host of issues. The specifics of Palin's policy agenda are equally obscure. But the combined shrill of the TP and Palin have forced some mainstream conservative candidates for election or re-election to shift farther to the right to avoid being outflanked by TP- and Palin-backed candidates.

So unless the Tea Party/Palin sponsored candidates and those with TP/Palin support are totally blown away in four weeks, the establishment GOP is likely to be forced to move farther right on the ideological spectrum. Thus, Rove, backed by considerable financial resources, sees his tasks are to retain establishment control of the party philosophy, however altered, as well as having a large voice in the choice of future candidates. In the process, he also seeks to keep himself relevant as chief strategist and a mover and shaker of the party's future, roles he played previously for the benefit of former President George W. Bush.

On a slightly different but related note, I have always found columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. of the Washington Post to be a keen analyst of the state and direction of American politics. But his recent column "Tempest in a small Teapot" seemed a bit off the mark. He focused on the small numbers of TP adherents compared with the total size of the electorate and the number of voters in specific elections, noting further how the media has magnified the Tea Party in our politics. Where I see it differently is that it's not the numbers but the noise of the Tea Party movement that has made the difference, granting that its noise has been amplified by the media. But as that noise level has increased by the very vocal activism of TP adherents and fellow travelers, it has emerged as something bigger than the numbers cited by Dionne would suggest. At least for now the TP and Palin have become the voices of the unhappy voters(independents and moderate Republicans we are told). As that voice, they have on a number of important occasions eclipsed the establishment GOP as the spear carrier for those unhappy voters seeking a change from the policies of President Obama and the Democratic controlled Congress.

Stay tuned. After November 2 we may have a better view of "Whither the Tea Party?" "Whither Sarah Palin?" "Whither the GOP?" "Whither the rest of us?"